The wars of the peace candidate

"radical Muslims"?!?

Don't you mean your standard devout Koran-believing Muslims?

The radical Muslims are the less-than-devout Mohammadeans who have shown hesitancy in carrying out or supporting the Allah-Akbar-yelling, airplane-attacking, women-raping, hostage-beheading, and suicide bombing religious acts of the faithful jihadists in the Middle East and Europe.

I do feel better that we are staying, but I am uneasy with the potential of the President politicizing every military decision. Basically, will he let the military operate without restraints? This is my main concern, as we saw with the Clinton administration, there was fear that if we attacked Al Qaeda that the Europeans may be upset (Clinton admin saw a missile strike on Usama as violating the law of killing a foreign leader).

I think I know what you mean, that our president should listen to the military. at the same time I would NEVER want the military to operate without restraint. there is a very very important reason why our civilian president is the commander and chief. Correct me if wrong, but wars are a means to an end. that end always one that involves alot of political calculus. wwii for example is no exception. the congress did NOT want to enter that war or ww1. I think our govt was more balanced then when congress exercised their war powers and the president respected the constitutional role of congress.

I really wish we would promote human rights. but not as carter did. we should not meddle (which lead to the fall of the shaw). we should also not support "self-determination" per se. we should support , in a steady and propagandistic way, the ideals of the rule of law. constitutions. independent judiciary.

but then this would need to start at home. Obama should educate the public about our american ideal. that in turn would provide the public will to engage constructively internationally

“‘Both, honey, both,’ said Miss Hardcastle. ‘Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition … is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us—to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.’

“‘I don’t believe you can do that,’ said Mark. ‘Not with the papers that are read by educated people.’

“‘That shows that you’re still in the nursery, lovey,’ said Miss Hardcastle. ‘Haven’t you yet realized that it’s the other way round?’

“‘How do you mean?’

“‘Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t even need any reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.’”

~ C.S. Lewis, _That Hideous Strength_, pp. 99–100

Apart from rhetoric, Obama is so far following Bush's policies in the Global War against Radical Islam. Obama's populist move to do away with Gitmo is hardly any different than what McCain would have done. He has actually increased Predator strikes against al Quaeda in Pakistan that include civilian casualties; instead of using aggressive interrogation he's killing the terrorists without a trial. According to Max Boot, we're incarcerating three times as many unlawful combatants at our Bagram base in Afghanistan than Bush did. He, also, authorized the Seals to take out the Somali pirates.

The change in rhetoric is not trivial, though amusing. The "War on Terror" has become "Global Contingency Operations" and terrorist acts are termed "man caused disasters"; How silly and how revealing of Obama's insecurity.

Obama is doing OK on terrorism, though his domestic policies are an unmitigated disaster. Should he continue to press for utopian domestic goals, he won't be able to achieve his foreign policy ones. I still think that underneath it all he is a colossal empty suit with little experience and less accomplishment who has provided the Republicans with rich opportunity to come back in 2010 and 2012

David, you lack comprehension that St. Obama at base is a utopian celebrity president The American people, in the past usually hard headed about politics, have managed to elect a celebrity with little understanding of fiscal and probably in the long run national security realities.

You might read an incisive essay by James Bowman in New Criterion about this, The Death of Politics , including the following:

The utopians, like the poor I suppose, we have always with us, but I don’t think we have ever elected one to the presidency before. It is not fanciful, I fancy, to say that a good part of the reason why Mr McGovern was buried under Nixon’s electoral landslide was that people — including many of his fellow veterans of World War II who were then alive and now are not — could see even then something of the man’s na veté and otherworldliness now so clearly on display in this bizarre idea for a "time-out" to war, as if the world were some kind of macrocosmic kindergarten class that he had found himself inexplicably placed in charge of. At the time, I seem to remember, this same na veté expressed itself not only in his anti-war unilateralism but also in an equally bizarre scheme to end poverty — another of those "why nots?" I suppose — by having the federal government send a check for $1000 to everybody.

Of course, one thousand dollars was a lot more money in 1972 than it is today, and a family of four in many parts of the country might actually have been able to live on $4000 a year. The change since then is mainly because of the inflation that another gang of crypto-utopians wished upon the country at about the same time by treating money as the creation of the government rather than a measure of the economy’s productivity. But at least the debasement of the currency took place off the political stage, among the technocracy. No one ever went to the American people and asked them to vote to create massive amounts of fiat money, and my confidence in the people’s good sense, circa 1972, leads me to think that I know the reason why not. Now, President Obama has come before the children and grandchildren of the voters of 1972, making the sort of promises — free universal health care, millions of "good" jobs — that Mr McGovern himself might once have blushed at making, and they have elected him for it.

The fundamental truth about St. Obama is that he is a wooly headed utopian of the Left who took full advantage of the all too many contemporary Americans who confuse style with substance or celebrity for statesmanship.

James Bowman in his diary entry of 27 April makes some salient points about Obama's foreign policy as follows:

"Over the weekend, John Kass of The Chicato Tribune made what you might think would be the obvious point that, in releasing the "torture" memos and then suggesting that prosecutions of Bush administration officials might result from them, President Obama made a mistake which must have endangered the flow of intelligence about future terrorist activity that threatens American lives.

His intelligence gatherers — and others who give them the tools and the go-ahead — can’t spend their time wondering if he has their backs. His statements surely sent spasms through bureaucracies that are vital to his own success and America’s safety. All because he wanted to campaign, rather than lead.

Likewise, Con Coughlin, writing in the London Daily Telegraph, noticed that

The Taliban continues its menacing advance on the Pakistani capital. The Iranian president reiterates his hateful anti-Israeli rhetoric, while Israel’s newly elected Right-wing prime minister makes veiled threats about launching military action to prevent a second Holocaust. Yet the only subject that appears to concern Barack Obama is whether or not senior officials from the previous administration should face prosecution for the harsh interrogation techniques used against terror suspects in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

It seems obvious to both these writers, in other words, that the President has blundered — that, having the purpose of taking up the burden of American power in the world, he has been either too inexperienced or ill-advised to do it properly. As Mr Coughlin puts it:

Whether a president supports a policy of hard power, as did George W Bush, or one of soft power, which appears to be Mr Obama''s preferred option, it is nevertheless important that the White House projects the sense of global leadership that goes with being the world''s largest military superpower.

But what if these were not mistakes? What if Messrs Kass and Coughlin are the ones who are mistaken? Maybe President Obama never wanted to exercise "global leadership" in the first place. The very words, after all, suggest the sort of "arrogance" that the President was apologizing for, on behalf of his poor, ill-led (up until now) country, on his recent European tour. Maybe he has never had any purpose of global leadership except in the sense that President Jimmy Carter had it thirty years ago: that is, by setting an example to the world of such high principles that nothing else will need to be done and therefore no further leadership will be required of him.

Mr Kass feels sure that the President "must stop campaigning someday, and start thinking like a chief executive." You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But I’m not so sure. As I mentioned in one of last week’s posts in a similar context, I’m very much afraid that one of the consequences of our electing as president someone who has had no executive experience and then subjecting him to the sort of adulation he has enjoyed in the media is that he has not yet had to learn the difference between campaigning and governing. Perhaps he never will."

James Bowman, a devout Christian, views Obama as basically a celebrity president who took full advantage of America's contemporary propensity to mistake style for substance and celebrity for statesmanship.

That's rather a thumb sucker of a comment. The Dems are a caricature of themselves. They indulged for years with Bush Derangement Syndrome and now faint at the slightest criticism of St. Obama.

It's kind of a variation on the Bible verse "a little love covereth a multitude of sins" (am not sure of chapter,verse at the moment , sorry!) but it seems typical of human behavior (and perhaps God's?) that if we love someone, then we are more likely to overlook their negatives?? Am sure national level politicians are very aware of this and enjoy what they can get away with when their favorable ratings are high???